Jason Kunwar is a Nepalese multi-instrumentalist and composer. A powerful advocate for social impact, Jason’s community engagement work is focused on the preservation of Nepalese traditions and his ongoing educational initiative ‘Know Your Instrument’ facilitates workshops for a new generation of folk music students. He has also produced and directed three mini-documentaries on traditional Nepali music and instrumentation, and collaborated with Academy Award-winning composer and director A.R. Rahman. On this work, Jason has said, “An ideology of preserving everything endangered is far from my conception. I hope and intend that the outcomes of ‘Know Your Instrument’ and my other research endeavors stimulate discourse on the issue of musical sustainability and the development of approaches to support musical tradition.”
In 2020, Jason received a OneBeat Accelerator grant for his project ‘Confluence’, a program for musicians of diverse backgrounds in Nepal to engage in a virtual creative collaboration, offering a platform for artists to explore how they can create and work amid a crisis, how to connect with audiences from complete isolation, and how artists can deal with shared conditions of isolation.
